The Palestinians' application for membership in the United Nations was welcomed, even by critics of the Palestinian Authority, because it was understood as the close, albeit belated, of an overly long chapter. This was the chapter in which the Palestinian leadership, in exchange for dubious guarantees and slivers of privilege for a small group, took part in a charade of negotiations, while in reality, the area intended for the realization of the Palestinians' right to self-determination kept being reduced and fragmented. This chapter exposed the fact that the parties in Israel's various coalition governments disagree on only one thing: the number and size of the Palestinian Bantustans in Israel's master plan.
I don't agree with Akiva Eldar's perspective on Israeli-Palestinian peace, but he is right about one thing: Netanyahu will use the attacks to justify even harsher treatment of the Palestinians, and the blood of those victims will then be used to pull the Palestinians back towards a maximalist position, since every other strategy seems to end in failure.
"The attacks in the south should remind us that in the Israeli-Palestinian military arena there is no knockout victory. Whoever didn't want the Palestina Liberation Organization got Hamas. Whoever didn't want Hamas is getting Al-Qaida."
The myth of Israel's Goliath image has been slain From Ha'aretz
Akiva Eldar
The planning, time, place and methodology of the attacks in the south indicate that the intention was not just to kill Israelis, avenge Palestinian deaths, or speed up the end of occupation. Whoever sent the terrorists is no friend of President Mahmoud Abbas and his people, who are scurrying around trying to lobby support for a UN General Assembly vote for a Palestinian state next month.. . .
Despite my criticism of its government, its military, and its founding ideology, there has always been one positive fact about the State of Israel that has provided a true - if generally non sequitur - argument in its defense:
Out of all the Middle Eastern states, within the territory it captured in 1948, freedom of expression has been the strongest.
It's been hardly ideal, mind you, considering that people were still jailed for advocating against Zionism, but it has still, traditionally, been legal for people within the Green Line to write, talk, and demonstrate for the Palestinians, about what has happened to them, and it has remained legal for some of them (particularly Jews) to point out the problems that Zionism has wrought.
With the passage of these laws, Netanyahu and Lieberman have again changed the score in the Middle East, and not in Israel's favour. Where the Arabs are moving towards freedom, laying down their lives for the right to write and say what they want, the Knesset is curtailing those rights. While the Turkish government is finally making some move to reduce the restrictions on Kurdish culture and language, the Israeli government is making it illegal to talk about what happened to the Palestinians in 1948.
I don't say this with any schadenfreude. It would be nice to feel some pleasure at watching the State of Israel descend into fascism, but it isn't humanly possible. It is, however, possible to hope that this signals the conflict entering its final phase, and that Zionism will finally be forced to take a look at itself in the mirror to see what it has become.
The secretary of the settlement of Elazar, Yossi Kaufman, told Haaretz: "[Residents of] Elazar have approached the regional council and requested that the settlement's buses not have an Arab driver. If army directives require a guard for an Arab entering the community, there can't be an Arab school-bus driver. If someone wants to earn a living, be my guest. In fact, Arabs built the houses in Elazar. When it comes to children, that's an issue of safety. We were notified that the driver is not Arab and that was the end of the story."
"I feel a lot of respect and empathy [for] Mubarak. He was an important leader for his country, I believe he enjoyed the respect of many Egyptians," Barak said, adding that Mubarak was "quite successful, under the circumstances" in dealing with Egypt's many challenges.
. . . A source that was present at the scene said, "As soon as Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu introduced himself, Rabbi Steinman, who knew why he was being approached, said 'I won't sign,' and immediately left the room.". . .
One of Steinman's confidants related the rabbi's words to Haaretz: "They are making a fierce nationalistic statement. We will not irritate others, that is not the Haredi way. There are things that should not be done; what if there would be a similar call in Berlin against renting properties to Jews? Where is the public conscience? What will this do to Jews around the world? We must act responsibly.". . .
. . . Avoiding the security forces at West Bank checkpoints, they took the women out to eat in a restaurant in Jaffa, swimming in the Mediterranean, and took them home via Jerusalem where they could see the Old City walls from afar. . .Most of the Palestinians had never seen the sea or visited certain holy places. None of them had permits to enter Israel. . .
They had grown up less than an hour away, but they had never seen the sea.
The outrage of Zionism is that it proposes that a Jew who cannot trace a single ancestor to anywhere near Palestine should have a greater right - a "birthright" - to live and travel in that land than an Arab whose family has lived and worked there for generations. That is why those of us who have no other ill-feeling towards Jews or Judaism find the Zionist project to be so morally nauseating.
Peace will not come from the hollow theatrics on now display in Washington and New York. Peace will come when ordinary people resolve, as Ilana Hammerman did, to disregard the racist laws that maintain the status quo. Ordinary people have to act first, and only then will the leaders be dragged, kicking and screaming.
Israel declares huge amounts of private Palestinian land as firing zones and expels the residents under the false and self-righteous guise of concern for their welfare, lest they be harmed by the military training; but these firing zones are always to be found solely on Palestinian land, and never on settlement land. Have you ever heard of any settlers being expelled from their homes because their settlement was declared part of a firing zone? But against these wretched shepherds in the Jordan Valley, anything goes. This is Israeli justice, this is equality as practiced by the Israel Defense Forces.
Unless you've been completely out of contact with any form of news media in the past twelve days, you've probably heard a great deal about an Israeli commando raid on a Turkish aid flotilla bound for the Gaza strip that left 9 civilians dead.
Since the raid occured, two competing narratives have emerged, one supporting the point of view of the aid workers who were trying to bring humanitarian supplies into Gaza, and one supporting the Israeli government position.
Regardless of the arguments and evidence presented by the protagonists for either side, there are (at least) 4 facts that remain undisputed by any party.
1. A civilian ship was raided by Israeli commandos. An Israeli craft was not raided by a civilian ship
2. The raid was conducted at night, from a helicopter.
3. The raid took place in international waters
4. The siege of Gaza was a response to the victory of Hamas in Palestinian legislative elections.
One may draw different conclusions from these facts, but I have yet to see any source, representing any point of view, that disputes that they are facts.
My conclusions are as follows:
The first is important because it is mostly forgotten by spokespeople of various zionist organizations who want to blame the activists for being raided. "They had pipes and knives!" they say, "clearly this was a premeditated attack on Israel." Clearly, if Israel's enemies have been reduced to attacking its soldiers with pipes and kitchen knives, the threats to the country are greatly overstated.
#2 is important because it the timing of events was completely under Israeli control. If they had wanted to intercept the ship in broad daylight and tow it to another destination, they could have - they have done this with previous flotillas that have tried to run the Gaza blockade. If we make the charitable assumption that Israeli planners did not mean for violence to occur, the fact that its plans may have gone awry cannot be blamed on anyone but them.
#3 is not of relevance to what occured during the raid, but tells us something about the international reaction. This was an act of piracy. The Turkish reaction is, therefore, justifiable - Turks were killed on the high seas by a foreign power while not themselves violating any international statute. The American lack of reaction is equally unjustifable, given that an American citizen was also killed.
#4 needs to be pointed out because the justification for the siege - and therefore the excuse for the humanitarian crisis that the Israeli government has created - is often made out to be Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli cities. The Hamas campaign of firing homemade rockets into Israel, however, really only picked up in response to the siege. At the time that the siege was implemented, the rationale was to weaken a democratically-elected Palestinian government by punishing the population from which it drew its greatest support.
The claim, therefore, that the siege is necessary to keep weapons out of Gaza is, therefore, a post facto justification, dredged up to justify a policy that failed in its original goals.
The hasbara machine, however, has a conveniently short memory.
Canada's New Government (TM) has ordered CIDA to stop giving money to the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN agency formed to provide humanitarian relief for Palestinians displaced by the creation of Israel.
According to Embassy Magazine, the move has been puzzling for agency officials, Canadian public servants, and regional diplomats:
Jordan's ambassador to Ottawa says the Canadian government still hasn't explained exactly why it stopped providing direct budgetary support to the UN agency responsible for helping Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, 1.9 million of which live in his country.
A representative for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, says the organization is similarly mystified, but that Canadian budgetary support is essential as the agency struggles with a $90-million shortfall this year.
What has become clear, however, is that despite allegations made by pro-Israel groups—and alluded to by some Cabinet ministers—CIDA staff were extremely confident that there was "minimal" risk of Canadian funding to UNRWA being directed to terrorist groups. Rather, internal CIDA documents say the agency was "quite strong in its relevance to Canadian priorities" and financial management.
If you are one of those souls who are mystified by this move, then please, allow me to explain:
The Palestinian refugee problem exists for 2 reasons.
a) Zionist militias drove Palestinians from their lands in 1948 (a second wave fled their homes during the Six-Day-War as the IDF advanced).
b) Arab countries where most of them currently reside won't give them citizenship, and those living in the West Bank are living under IDF occupation.
The existence of UNRWA facilitates b). By providing Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt with food and shelter, UNRWA takes pressure off the Palestinians to scatter in search of sustenance (which the pro-Israel camp hopes would be the end of the Palestinian nation), and takes the pressure off Arab governments to either accomodate or eliminate by force a restive and hungry refugee population. Accomodating the Palestinians sounds attractive, until you realize that most Egyptians and Lebanese people are not that well off, and would not take kindly to their governments doling out food and housing to people who are already very explicit in their own desire to live elsewhere, i.e. home.
Harper and his cabinet don't see any problem with a). In their eyes, a Jew from Toronto has more of a right to live in Jerusalem than an Arab who was born there, because, in a nutshell, God said so. Consequently, impoverishing UNRWA and thereby starving the Palestinians of the means to stay alive suits their goals.
If all this sounds a little far-fetched, it isn't just my theory. The abolition of UNRWA has been on the wishlist of radical zionist groups for decades. While individual websites offer detailed explanations of how this would benefit the zionist cause, a simple Google search for "abolish UNRWA" drives the point home well enough.
'If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state' – Ehud Barak Photograph: JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images
Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, last night delivered an unusually blunt warning to his country that a failure to make peace with the Palestinians would leave either a state with no Jewish majority or an "apartheid" regime.
His stark language and the South African analogy might have been unthinkable for a senior Israeli figure only a few years ago and is a rare admission of the gravity of the deadlocked peace process.
There have been no formal negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in more than a year, but Barak was speaking at a rare joint event with the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, as part of an annual national security conference in the Israeli city of Herzliya. The pair shook hands and both were warmly applauded.
Barak, a former general and Israel's most decorated soldier, sought to appeal to Israelis on both right and left by saying a peace agreement with the Palestinians was the only way to secure Israel's future as a "Zionist, Jewish, democratic state".
"As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic," Barak said. "If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."
He described Israel and the Palestinian territories as the historic "land of Israel" to which Israelis had a right.
"We have to demarcate a border within the land of Israel," he said.
"We have a linkage, we have a right, but the reality of standing on the stage of history in realistic terms requires us to pay attention to international constraints." Barak is in a delicate political position. He leads the Labour party, supposedly a centre-left movement, but accepted a position in a rightwing coalition under Binyamin Netanyahu, a decision that split his party.
Though Barak articulates a willingness for peace talks, he represents a government that has defied US and Palestinian calls for a full settlement freeze as a prelude to any negotiations. He was also defence minister during last year's Gaza war in which nearly 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.
The Herzliya conference has echoed Israeli concerns about growing international criticism, particularly in the year since Gaza. Barak himself alluded to the danger that Israel might lose legitimacy if no peace deal was forthcoming. "The pendulum of legitimacy is going to move gradually towards the other pole," he said.
He acknowledged that Washington was pushing the two sides towards "proximity talks" but said this was "only an initial stage" before any return to full negotiations.
Fayyad, who has a limited political following among Palestinians, called on Israel to stop settlement building in the occupied territories and to halt military incursions in Palestinian cities as a sign of seriousness about negotiations.
"Things have to begin to happen in order to give the suggestion that this occupation is going to end," he said. "That Palestinian state is supposed to emerge precisely where settlements are expanding." Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has refused to start fresh negotiations with Israel unless settlement construction stops, in line with the 2003 US road map. Nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers live in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, even though settlements on occupied land are illegal under international law.
"How confident can we all be that once relaunched that political process is going to be able to deliver that which needs to be delivered, the permanent status issues and the key question of ending the occupation?" Fayyad asked.
We have articulated and implemented a zero tolerance approach to anti-Semitism. What does this mean? It means that we eliminated the government funding relationship with organizations like for example, the Canadian Arab Federation, whose leadership apologized for terrorism or extremism, or who promote hatred, in particular anti-Semitism.
We have ended government contact with like-minded organizations like the Canadian Islamic Congress, whose President notoriously said that all Israelis over the age of 18 are legitimate targets for assassination. We have defunded organizations, most recently like KAIROS, who are taking a leadership role in the boycott. And we’re receiving a lot of criticism for these decisions. I can’t recall how many times I’ve been sued for some of the decisions that we have taken, but we believe that we’ve done these things for the right reasons and we stand by these decisions.
And so it continues . . . Not content with its boycott of the Canadian Arab Federation for its criticism of the government's policies (a move that mainly hurt people looking for ESL training), or its banning of British anti-Occupation firebrand George Galloway from entering the country, Harper's government is at it again. As usual his henchman Jason Kenney is at the forefront, this time crowing to an overwhelmingly Jewish, 100% Zionist audience at having once again moved to stifle criticism of Israel using the oldest trick in the book - scream anti-Semitism.
Even one blogger for the National Post, that insolvent anti-Canadian CanWest rag, sees some inconsistencies in the Kenney's position, as the Honourable Minister attempted to straighten out his story in the Toronto Star:
I did not accuse KAIROS of being anti-Semitic. What I said was that KAIROS has taken "a leadership role in the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign (against Israel)." While I disagree with the nature of KAIROS's militant stance toward the Jewish homeland, that is not the reason their request for taxpayer funding was denied. International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda – not me – is responsible for the Canada International Development Agency. And she has been clear that a cost-sharing program with KAIROS was not approved because it did not meet CIDA's current priorities, such as increased food aid.
He didn't accuse them of anti-Semitism, he just mentioned them in the same breath as other organizations whom he had accused of the same thing.
I don't see anything wrong with an international boycott of Israeli goods - that was what ended the apartheid in South Africa, and Israel is no less dependent on international trade. Is, however, KAIROS even advocating that? A 2002 document released by the group answers the question explicitly:
The final step of the Board-mandated process is this paper, which sets out a range of options to enable the members of KAIROS to contribute, each out of their own faith tradition, to their common quest for a just peace in Israel and Palestine. The paper also contains recommendations for KAIROS actions that would support member initiatives. Finally, section 6 of the paper also makes clear that KAIROS is not advocating sanctions against Israel nor a boycott of products from Israel. (emphasis from KAIROS)
A further reading of the document shows that KAIROS supports "Morally Responsible Investment" and not the more forthright "Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions" campaign. Their "economic advocacy" is ill-defined, but examples provided include moves from other Church groups to divest from companies providing equipment for the construction of infrastruction used by the Occupation, such as the Wall, and requiring the labelling of products made in Jewish colonies in the West Bank.
None of this, however, actually matters to Jason Kenney, or to Stephen Harper. What matters to them is that God gave the Holy Land to the Jewish people in the Bible, and the nasty infidel Muslim Arabs (and in the minds of Mssrs Harper and Kenney, there is no other kind) are standing in the way.
Now that international jurist and affirmed zionist John Goldstone has suggested in his UN report that the IDF committed war crimes in Gaza, the denial machine amongst zionists worldwide has swung into overdrive.
Israel struck a civilian population that remains under its control, it didn't fulfill its obligation to distinguish between civilians and militants and used military force disproportionate with the tangible threat to its own civilians. Air Force drones and helicopters fired deadly missiles at civilians, many of them children; the Tank Corps and Navy shelled civilian neighborhoods with weapons not designed for precision strikes; soldiers received orders to fire on rescue crews; others fired on civilians carrying white flags; and others killed people in or near their homes. Troops used Gazans as human shields, soldiers detained civilians in abusive conditions, the army used white phosphorus shells in dense civilian areas and, on the eve of withdrawing, destroyed wide residential, industrial and agricultural areas.
There is only thing worse than denial - the admission that the IDF indeed acted as has been described, but that these actions are both normal and appropriate.
. . . has become an unwitting tool for zionists in Canada, as they seek to dampen the growing movement for boycott and divestment from the world's last formally colonial state.
Naomi Klein, Jewish Canadian author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine , lays it all out in a commendable article for the Globe and Mail:
. . .For more than a year, Israeli diplomats have been talking openly about their new strategy to counter growing global anger at Israel's defiance of international law. It's no longer enough, they argue, just to invoke Sderot every time someone raises Gaza. The task is also to change the subject to more pleasant areas: film, arts, gay rights – things that underline commonalities between Israel and places such as Paris and New York. After the Gaza attack, this strategy went into high gear. “We will send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theatre companies, exhibits,” Arye Mekel, deputy director-general for cultural affairs for Israel's Foreign Ministry, told The New York Times. “This way, you show Israel's prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war.”
Toronto got an early taste of all this. A year ago, Amir Gissin, Israeli consul-general in Toronto, explained that a new “Brand Israel” campaign would include, according to a report in the Canadian Jewish News, “a major Israeli presence at next year's Toronto International Film Festival, with numerous Israeli, Hollywood and Canadian entertainment luminaries on hand.” Mr. Gissin pledged that, “I'm confident everything we plan to do will happen.” Indeed it has. . . .
The professional fearmongers over at Robert Spencer's "JihadWatch" recently posted this article from the distressingly confused Anti-Defamation League (ADL), complaining that the WhyIslam? website linked to other websites that "feature extreme anti-Semitic and anti-Israel invective."
While two of the examples cited at least complain of what could legitimately be called anti-Semitic, or at least Anti-Jewish sentiments, this one was interesting:
"- IslamOnline, a Web-based publication connected to Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi, a radical Muslim brotherhood ideologue based in Qatar. The publication promotes anti-Israel terrorist groups, has referred to Zionism as a "cancer," and has repeatedly claimed that the close ties between the U.S. and Israel demonstrate their mutual desire to oppress Muslims. In January 2008, IslamOnline published a poem in its Arts and Culture section that gave graphic instructions on how to behead someone."
Thanks for giving us the whole story, guys. It's also nice to see the ADL reiterating its position that Zionism = Judaism.
Now, let's see what we can find on the front page, sans disclaimer, of the lovely JihadWatch website - leave alone the site's own numerous calls to end Muslim immigration to Western countries.
One doesn't have to scroll far down to find "Bare Naked Islam," a site hosting stories like "Islam's rules for having SEX WITH ANIMALS" and a banner slogan at the head of the site stating "It isn't Islamophobia when they really are trying to kill you!" along with such gems as
Arab presence in the land called Israel was VIRTUALLY NON-EXISTENT until the late 19th-early 2oth Centuries when the Zionists took over.
Only the mentally unstable deny the existence of Palestinians, while posting in turquoise.
If that doesn't do it for you, how about the infamous "Religion of Peace" website! The content speaks for itself, as does the fact that it was one of the earliest links added to the JihadWatch sidebar. My personal favourite gem from this one: "Muslim immigration into the UK has left a trail of rape victims, but as long as the political elite place a higher value on multiculturalism, Britain's women will just have to keep taking one for the team!
Or how about the "Stop the Islamisation of Europe" site. The graphics accompanying its campaign to end Mosque construction speak for themselves.
Then there's this lovely gem from the "What should a free man do?" blog: More mayhem in Europe. More blatant, in-your-face disobedience here. More recruitment into state-side versions of these once sand-bound savage tribes.
Or how about this lovely passage from yet another "essay" by European "essayist" Fjordman, whom Spencer has gone to lengths to defend:
"Muhammed was a brilliant intuitive leader/general, and he and his companions devised a near perfect closed system of war aginst the rest of humanity. Only by showing that Allah is not infallible can we be victorious in keeping our freedom, our life, our liberty and pursuit of our happiness. Muslims are extremely childish in their view of themselves and the world - they are superstitious and thus afraid of dogs, of the Koran getting dirty etc. They continually tell us the truth about their paranoia, and their intentions. Therefore, one of the best tactics for us to take in the War on Terror is to mock them and exploit their childishness, so that they will expose themselves to everyone."
You don't need, however, to go hunting (or actually, randomly clicking) on links from the Jihadwatch sidebar to find the fearmongers. The site itself is dedicated to the purpose, as are all of Spencer and co.'s hate-filled screeds about Islam and Muslims.
Did the editors of the WhyIslam site display some bad judgment on their Resources page? Perhaps, but for JihadWatch to complain . . .
It should be noted that the siege of Gaza was imposed not as a response to rocket attacks, which it pre-dated, but as a response to the 2006 Palestinian elections, in which Hamas won a democratic majority over the notoriously corrupt and ineffectual leadership of Fatah.
One of the few Israeli journalists of conscience, Gideon Levy, puts it well:
The Israel Defense Forces has once again used its power to overcome the weak; the navy has once again acted like pirates. The Arion was abducted in the framework of protecting Israel's security for all eternity, blah, blah, blah. . .
. . . This then is the great progress of the "people's army" to train women to kill, while their comrades, soldiers and Border Police, are routinely sent to shoot live fire at unarmed demonstrators at Bil'in and Na'alin. This, for the most part, is the IDF's balance sheet. This is what largely preoccupies the best, most moral army in the world. Pilots who have never fought in an air battle and soldiers with no army against them now spend most of their time maintaining the occupation in a kind of pathetic combat, and they are our protective shield. When the day of reckoning comes, we will remember this.
So it turns out that you can do a lot of things if you're the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration.
Konservative Immigration minister Jason Kenney has been having a blast this last month. The first thing he did in early March was to proudly announce that he was going to terminate language-training contracts with the Canadian Arab Federation because they publicly opposed his political views.
"Here we have in Canada, someone who, until the end of this month at least, was receiving public subsidies from my department, who says ... these organizations that are essentially anti-Semitic and seek the destruction of Israel ... should be able to operate in Canada," Kenney said.
Actually, the CAF was not recieving any "subsidy" but a contract from Citizenship and Immigration to offer language training to newcomers - many of whom are not Arabs. Kenney's decision, however, is strangely coincidental with some harsh criticism he received from the CAF's president, but never mind that. I have no information that the CAF supports any policy regarding what organizations should or should not be allowed to operate in Canada, but even if they did, so what?
Just one of the worrisome implications of Kenney's statement is that once an organization is on the list of banned organizations, discussion of its place there ist stark verboten, as the Germans say. If that's true, then the only way for an organization to get its name off the list is for the Government of the day to take the initiative and do it - any organization that calls for a change to the list is going to be blacklisted, because obviously, they support the terrorists.
The second thing you can apparently do if you're Immigration Minister is override your department's decision if they decide to, for "security" reasons, ban someone from coming into the country. In the case of George Galloway, whom the ministry ostensibly found to be a "security threat," Kenney unsurprisingly refused, with his spokesman saying "we don't want him to pee on our carpet."
Ostensibly, Kenney and co. are afraid that Galloway's visit to Canada will entail him holding fundraisers for Hamas, or meeting in darkened rooms with Al-Qaeda sleeper agents, or perhaps accepting brown envelopes full of cash which he will then FedEx to various organizations whose names are engraved on the aforementioned List.
Evidently, no one at Immigration has heard of the wire transfer.
More likely they are afraid that Galloway will do something that makes embarassing headlines for neoconservatives everywhere.
For instance, there was that time that the US Congress, strangely unaware of all the Canadian government's security "intelligence" on Mr. Galloway, invited him to a hearing.
Or there was that time he savaged the SkyNews anchor for her biased reporting of the war in Lebanon:
And then there were his many encounters with erstwhile Trotskyite turned atheist neocon, Christopher Hitchens:
. . .but enough of that.
Obviously, Mr. Galloway only poses a "security" risk if by "security" you mean the political fortunes of Kenney's ideological fellow travellers.
Now whom do we find defending this reprehensible attack on freedom of speech? None other than the odious Ezra Levant, himself a self-styled champion of unrestricted expression:
George Galloway, the pro-terrorist MP from the United Kingdom, has been denied entry to Canada on security grounds. I suspect it has to do with his track record of providing financial assistance to terrorist groups like Hamas, which is listed as a criminal organization in Canada. It would not surprise me if CSIS determined that Galloway's visit would have had fundraising or recruiting spin-offs for Hamas or other terrorist groups. I'm sure Galloway himself would boast of those activities. (UPDATE: I am advised that, in fact, his planned speaking engagement at a Toronto church was to raise funds for Hamas.)
Aha! So it was a Hamas fundraiser! Hosted by a Church, no less! Well where is this church?! Let's close that place down too! Obviously it is breaking the law no less than Mr. Galloway.
How exactly do Levant, or the thousands of other conservative bloggers who are spreading this nonsense know that it is a Hamas fundraiser? Well, the truth is that they don't - they just made it up, because I'm pretty sure that the Metropolitan United Church did not circulate a flyer saying "George Galloway: From Gaza to Kandahar. Admission $5. All Proceeds to Hamas."
Levant is, like most of his bedwetting ilk, disingenuous in his love of free speech.
Neither he, nor Jason Kenney, have anything on George Galloway, other than his criticism of their shared love of violent imperialism.
The question nobody has asked, however, is why non-state actors qualify for the list of "terrorist" organizations, when state actors strangely do not.
The above poster is a cartoon. Whether or not a small boy holding a teddy bear, casting a shadow forming the word "Gaza" was ever fired upon by an Israeli helicopter is irrelevant.
The poster makes no claims about Jews, or even about Israelis. It presents the conflict, however, as the David-and-Goliath struggle that it is, where a high-tech, multi-billion dollar army of occupation, motivated by a religious-nationalist ideology, seeks to crush the life of the native population.
When two Canadian universities banned the above poster from appearing on their billboards, the argument of one of them was:
"A poster from the campus group Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights has recently come to the attention of the Communications Office. All posters approved by the Communications Office must promote a campus culture where all members of the community can play a part in a declaration of human rights recognizing the inherent dignity and equal rights of all students. Consequently, we will not place this particular poster on our campus billboards."
In other words, because the poster was going to upset Zionists, it couldn't be displayed.
When the Muhammad cartoons were published in Canada, every wingnut came out of the woodwork to defend Ezra Levant. Despite my distaste for the man, I was with them, and not only because fining the man only increased his fame. When Geert Wilders produced his film "Fitna," I yawned, and wondered what the fuss was about. He has since become a hero amongst the usual anti-Islam types who style themselves "defenders of free speech."
